![[The Netizen]](logosmall.gif)
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A Growing Slice The Wired/Merrill Lynch Forum Digital Citizen Survey, conducted by Luntz Research Companies, polled 1,444 Americans to examine their views on technology and society. The survey divided respondents into four categories:
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by
Jon
Katz
Since 1992, as a writer for both Wired and its online cousin HotWired, I have been tracking the emergence of a new political ethos that I have seen developing in cyberspace. Over the years, as I explored the Web and exchanged email with countless people all over the world, I felt I was witnessing the birth of a new political sensibility that lies beyond the tired rhetorical combat of Democrats and Republicans. In April of this year, I sketched the outlines of this sensibility in an essay called "Birth of a Digital Nation" (see Wired 5.04, page 49). In that article, I described the primordial stirrings of a new "postpolitical" community that blends the humanism of liberalism with the economic vitality of conservatism. I wrote that members of this group consistently reject both the interventionist dogma of the left and the intolerant ideology of the right. Instead, I argued, Digital Citizens embrace rationalism, revere civil liberties and free-market economics, and gravitate toward a moderated form of libertarianism. But without real leaders or a clearly defined agenda, I remarked, they seemed unable to channel their abundant energy and knowledge in meaningful directions. "Can we build a new kind of kind of politics?" I asked. "Can we construct a more civil society with our powerful technologies? Are we extending the evolution of freedom among human beings? Or are we nothing more than a great, wired babble pissing into the digital wind?" . . . . Discuss the survey
with Jon Katz and other digital citizens, in Threads.
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